In the final weeks of 2024, a certain TikTok screenshot continuously made the rounds on my friends’ social media feeds. “I never see you at the club” okay? I never see you enjoying the splendor of film in your local cinema with a medium popcorn and a crisp diet coke, the caption read. On the contrary, I spent a record-breaking amount of time at the movies this year—and I spotted all manner of familiar faces in the concessions line. Whenever I surveyed my circle about weekend plans, I learned about another exciting screening at one of LA’s repertory theaters; when I signed up for AMC’s A-List pass, I was stunned by how many of my pals had already subscribed to the service. Spell it out on the marquee: the movies are so back.

A few years ago, most of us wouldn’t have been able to predict this plot twist. During the peak of the pandemic, theaters across America went dark. Some of them never turned their lights back on. The famed Cinerama Dome, an iconic Sunset Boulevard landmark, ceased operations when parent company ArcLight shuttered—an omen lamented by moviegoers and industry bigwigs alike. Over 2,000 other cinemas joined its ranks (per The Hollywood Reporter). As production companies pushed major releases onto streaming platforms, the smell of butter and pretzel bites became a distant memory. Eventually, foreboding headlines crept into the papers: “Sorry, We Aren’t Going Back to the Movies,” one New York Times writer declared. 

How good it feels to look back from a brighter future and see how off-base we were. Surprise, surprise—after getting accustomed to staying cooped up, we’re finally yearning for "that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim and we go somewhere we’ve never been before… together"

As Nicole Kidman suggests in her beloved AMC ad, part of the joy of going to the movies is the opportunity to have a collective emotional experience. Gathered in close proximity, initiated into a sacred anonymity, we sense a psychic intimacy between ourselves and our fellow moviegoers, strangers though they be. This intimacy is heightened when the film onscreen is especially moving, intense, or provocative. One 2024 release that met these criteria was The Substance, dubbed “the most disgusting film” of the year. Coralie Fargeat’s buzzy body horror flick leans into surrealism and absurdism, with some major tonal shifts throughout. Scenes of sci-fi medical gore are followed by flashy dance montages, which are followed by grotesque monster reveals, which are followed by over-the-top bloodbaths played for laughs. Squeals, screams, giggles, and guffaws abounded at my screening, in a way I hadn’t observed since watching Get Out during its opening weekend. Throughout the autumn, I heard the same refrain over and over: “You have to see it in theaters.”

Some 2024 films elicited audience responses in a particularly intentional way, breaking the convention of plunging audiences into uninterrupted darkness for two hours. I’m thinking of Megalopolis and The Brutalist, both of which came with special instructions for theater staff. It’s hard to name the strangest moment from Francis Ford Coppola’s most ambitious feature, in which Adam Driver stops time to float above the city, recites the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in full, and gets shot in the face by a 12-year-old—but the “press conference scene” takes the cake. At select theaters during the film’s run, an employee would step forward to deliver a reporter character’s line; seconds later, Driver would reply onscreen. Similar interactive exchanges are common at Disneyland and Universal Studios—rarely have they reached such mundane realms as your neighborhood multiplex. Regardless of how you feel about Coppola’s narrative and dialogue subversions, his choice to shatter the fourth wall and deliver whimsy to general audiences (as opposed to just festival crowds) surely broke new ground—much like the utopian city of Megalopolis itself.

The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s 215-minute epic about an architect who moves to America after surviving the Holocaust, is far more straightforward on the story level—but it’s being screened in a way that bucks modern cinema tradition. Corbet has chosen to work a fifteen-minute intermission into the film, with a countdown clock appearing onscreen between “Part 1” and “Part 2.” According to IndieWire, Corbet has cited his own attention span as inspiration for the break—but as that publication notes, during the 20th-century, such intermissions were common for longer features. To me, it seems less like a concession to streaming-brained viewers and more like an intriguing synchronicity between cinema and live performance. Mediums considered “high art” such as theater, dance, and opera have long incorporated intermissions—why shouldn’t the film world experiment with them as well? Speaking to the resonance of moviegoing as a shared human experience, audiences are envisioning the intermission as an opportunity for connection, if only in the realm of fantasy: “You could literally meet the love of your life during The Brutalist intermission,” one Tweet reads.

Perhaps 2024’s most fun cinematic trend was the return of the uber-hyped double feature, a la last year’s “Barbenheimer” (July 21 releases Barbie and Oppenheimer, in case you were trapped on a desert isle with no WiFi). “Glicked,” the pairing of November 22nd films Gladiator II and Wicked, drew some attention amongst moviegoers excited for bombastic big-screen blockbusters—but “Babyratu,” combining new Christmas classics Babygirl and Nosferatu, has made a bigger cultural impact. While Gladiator II and Wicked share some DNA in that they’re long-awaited IP-based films, Babygirl and Nosferatu are thematically intertwined: the former, Halina Reijn’s latest collab with A24, follows an executive who explores her sexuality during an affair with a kinky intern, while the latter, Robert Eggers’ adaptation of the 1922 silent film, portrays a young woman’s seduction by a vampire. Furthermore, both films take place during the holiday season—not only tantalizing potential audiences with the promise of an immersive atmosphere, but also encouraging them to turn a trip to the movies into a festive event. (I have never before seen five of my friends log the same film on Letterboxd on the same exact day—but Nosferatu’s spell proved quite powerful on the 25th.)

Streaming services might be nice when we can’t bear to wiggle out of our pajamas—yet “DAZZLING IMAGES ON A HUGE SILVER SCREEN” and “SOUND THAT YOU CAN FEEL” are here to stay, and we’re all better off for it. Here’s to a new year of going to the movies together—may the trailers be thrilling, the crowds lively, the post-credits catharsis immaculate.